Bière de Balcon by the Drunk French Canadian

Today we have a guest post by mon ami Oni Dèls, AKA THE Drunk French Canadian! It's been a long time since I had a guest post here, but Oni has been around the Quebec scene for a long time, and even even worked at the Molson Brewery at one time, so he's been around! Today he's giving a review of his favourite beer for summer 2016 - Bière de Balcon by L'espace public - brasseurs de quartier!

Bière de Balcon
I have to tell you a secret: I'm not a “real” Montrealer. That is.. I wasn’t born on this island, but
rather on that other island. Anyways.. It’s of no real concern whether or not I come from a place that the local refers as “douchebag land”.
What I meant to say is that I moved roughly five years ago to a small neighbourhood called
Hochelaga, and just a couple weeks after that, a new pub.. pretty much the first of its kind in this
area, was opening: L’espace Public - brasseurs de quartier.
L'espace Public is a bar dedicated to fun beers for fun people made by people dedicated to making great beers. It didn't me take long until I became a regular there, and now I'm following their evolution in this local beer revolution that's happening throughout the neighbourhood. Lately, we're seeing more and more microbrew-focused restaurants and pubs opened up
surrounding L'espace Public but none of them have the same following nor the same beer geeks who know what they wanted.
Now, they have reimagined their image and have launched their 3 first beers to take home: 3
sours in cans. Like many of their other popular beers, these 3 have odd and funny names, but I’m
going to focus solely on their berliner weiß, the Bière de Balcon (aka the Balcony Beer). This
sour is a mere 3% ABV and has a very lemony taste, but is brewed with raspberry and has a
sweet aftertaste, not too syrupy and not too sugary.. like sour candy that you can drink! This perfect
summer beer is great to be shared with friends on long evening in a packed apartment,
celebrating life and such. But beware: it is a sour beer. It’ll take more than just a sip to get use to
it, and some won't dare drink more than one. Shame though.. because the tongue gets used
to it rapidly and beside the occasional cheeks going inward, you’ll see that the can is quickly
empty.
But it is ok that you don't like it, a lot of crazy dudes and dudettes love sour beer, counting me
amongst their rank.

Oh. But that's not all, while I won’t go in deeper details (for now) about the two other cans, let me
whisper you sweet poetry about them: La Bière de coin de rue (aka corner street beer), a sour blonde with strong cereal taste, and the
very peculiar Bière de ruelle (aka back alley beer), a hoppy sour that reminds us of west coast
IPAs.
But that’s the canned ones. For their launch, the pub had a lot of sour on taps, many of their
own recipe, like their “mon ami(e)...” series (my friend...)
Mon amie Maxime, another hoppy sour..
Mon ami Whiskey, a smoked rye sour..
Mon ami Frank, a sour stout that taste like heaven, but mostly chocolate­y citrus..
And others, that sadly as I am writing this, 4 days after launch, have already been erased from the beer menu board and replaced by more conventional (read: less sour) beers.
I’m obviously 300% biased, because I love this place and the people who work here, but they do
brew really good beers, and if you happen to find yourself on Promenade Ontario,
remember my not­so­-wise words and go for a pint, you will thank me later!While so far the cans are only available in the greater Montreal area, we can only wish for it to
be distributed on a greater scale, and perhaps this is the start of a great line of beers from our
favourite pigeon brewers...